Social Media

 From the What is Social Media article, Think of regular media as a one-way street where you can read a newspaper or listen to a report on television, but you have very limited ability to give your thoughts on the matter.  Social media on the other hand is a two-way street that gives you the ability to communicate.  I joined the group Clif’s Notes On EdTech in diigo.  I joined this group because it has resources on education, technology, and quite a bit more.  Its tools, tips, and resources to help you be the most organized teacher you can be using the internet.  From assessment, to instruction, and special education, this site has a lot of great resources for helping you get your classroom organized and keep it that way throughout the year.  
There are so many reasons why the young and old find networking to be so appealing.  On sites that I’ve seen and personally been on there are opportunities to meet new people, find old friends that you lost content with, find jobs, keep updated with news and sports and information about today’s hot topics.  Networking websites can be used positively in many ways in a classroom.  Students can collaborate on projects with students in different school, cities, states, and countries.  This allows for so much in a classroom, open ended possibilities with projects in any subject.  With any form of networking there are always negative ways that this technology can be used if it is not monitored properly or frequently.  Cyber bullying is something that is common and I think what we read about or hear about most with these sites.  I think that the positive hugely outweighs the negative.  Strict guidelines just need to be established with students and parents prior to using this in the classroom. 
 Personally I actually tend to spend quite a bit of time networking on facebook, keeping up with family and friends I don’t get to see or talk to often.  Professionally I would tend to spend time networking on websites that have any kind of resources or tools that I could utilize in my classroom with the equipment that I have available to use.  I keep in touch with teachers that I have worked with and always bounce ideas off of them or find out what they are doing in different subjects for ideas.  This benefits me every time I share ideas with fellow teachers, I love to see what they’re doing, how I can improve something, or new ideas I can try.  This helps me keep lessons fresh and interesting for my students.  Plus there are always new ideas on websites about lessons and subjects to help me with my planning.  I don’t know that I see any drawbacks to this.  Planning with other professionals can only help and provide more creativity.  As said in the Social Media video, social media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.  We no longer search for news, the news finds us.  In the near future we will no longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media.

Gaming

Gaming has accelerated quite a bit in recent years.  These games range from simple paper and pencil to complex online gaming.  As a teacher I think that gaming can be a very useful and beneficial tool in the classroom.  If used appropriately and monitored students will benefit from gaming because they are from the technological era never knowing a world in which digital games were always an important part of their lives.  They have all the resources of the needed knowledge to access all these forms of gaming.  According to the 2010 Horizon Report research into games for educational purposes reveals some interesting trends.  Early studies of consumer games helped to identify the aspects of games that make them especially engaging and appealing to players of various ages and of both genders:  the feeling of working toward a goal; the possibility of attaining spectacular successes; the ability to problem-solve, collaborate with others, and socialize; an interesting story line; and other characteristics.  Gaming offers many positive advantages in an educational environment as a pose to reading about it in a textbook.  Technology engages students so much more than just reading about it.  Gaming and computer simulation encourage a learner not only to wonder, "What would happen if ...?" but also try out those alternatives virtually and see the consequences right in front of them according to Simulation Nation: The Promise of Virtual Learning Activities.  Some other benefits this technology offers to an educational environment according to the video No Gamer Left Behind is the opportunity for students to do real life procedures like surgery and be able to make mistakes without the real life consequences or experience an emergency room and the interactions with patients and other doctors. 
The 3 sites that I thought were interesting and fun were Shepphard Software, Arcademic Skill Builders, and Gamequarium.  Shepphard Software offers games in all subjects.  I played around with some Language games with nouns, verbs, and adjectives.  I also played a life cycle game.  Both games were fun and engaging.  Arcademic Skill Builders had Math, Language, and Geography games.  I played a state and capital game that was very helpful, it made me think :)  The last site was Gamequarium and this had games in all subjects as well, but the best part of this site was that it had e-books that could be downloaded for free.  I read through some of them.  This was very entertaining to me since I've never actually done anything with e-books.  Great games and technologies.

Legal, Illegal, and the Future

There was quite a lot of information in the readings and videos this week.  I didn't realize all the legalities that came with copyrighting and all the fine lines with creative commons, fair use, and open content.  And then electronic books get added to all of this.  These are so much more commonly used now and will just continue to increase in use.  The easiest way for me is start with telling what each of these topics are.  Open content is any kind of creative work including articles, pictures, audio, and video that is published in a format that explicitly allows the copying of the information.  Open content is also sometimes used to describe content that can be modified by anyone.  According to the 2010 Horizon Report on Open Content it has now come to the point that is rapidly driving changes in both the materials we use and the process of education.  At it's core the notion of open content is to take advantage of the Internet as a global dissemination platform for collective knowledge and wisdom, and to design learning experiences that maximize the use of it.  Creative commons is an organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to legally build upon and share.  The creative commons site enables copyright holders to grant some of their rights to the public while retaining others, through a variety of licensing and contract schemes, which may include dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms.  The intention is to avoid problems which current copyright laws create for the sharing of information.  According to the YouTube video on Copyright and Fair Use and Wikipedia  Copyright is a set of exclusive rights granted to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy, distribute and adapt the work.  Copyright does not protect ideas, only their expression.  Uses covered under limitations and exceptions to copyright, such as fair use, do not require permission from the copyright owner.  All other used require permission.  Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the right holders.  It seems to me that open content is a way for information to be shared and copied with not having to worry about copyright laws.  The creative common goes hand in hand with open content because it is designed to allow people to legally share and build on previous work or information.  Copyright is designed to protect an author or creator of any original work.  The author or creator are the only ones that have the right to sell or copy their works.  If anyone wants to use any of these works they need permission from the original author or creator.  I think the main reason for this is because of money.  The original author or creator has all rights to their work and any profit that is made when used or when someone else uses it.  Then we come to electronic books or e-books as they are often called.  According to the 2010 Horizon Report on E-books the convenience of having an entire library of books, magazines, and newspaper - each remembering exactly where you left off the last time you looked at them - all in a single, small device is one of the most compelling aspects driving electronic reader sales.  3 reasons that campuses have been slower to adopt electronic books are availability, the ability to render high quality illustrations, and the publishing model and their formats.  With today's technology all of these reasons are becoming extinct. 
All of these concepts mean something different for education.  Open content and creative commons want anyone including students to be able to legally be able to copy or share information from any source that allows it.  This makes researching or sharing certain information in a classroom easier because of legal binds.  Copyright and fair use are set up so that no one can take the credit for or earn money for something that does not belong to them or that they didn't create.  This teaches students to make sure to give credit where credit is due and make sure they go through necessary loop holes if they want to use any information that is not theirs.  As far as e-books are concerned, I am sure classrooms in the future will have student books on some form of electronic device rather than textbooks.  As a teacher I do see future classrooms being more technologically advanced and all students having the necessary equipment for these ideas.  With as many books as I have I wish I would have been more knowledgeable about e-books because I would not need the huge storage space that I use for all my books.  I would have every title I love in one portable device, saving me space and money.